tensity in a relationship." said a New York psychologist. "He had almost a symbiotic relationship with women.

"He needed them and he loved them, but he needed a lot of them. And women seemed to be able to hurt him an awful lot." Freddie's marriage of less than two years had broken up. but friends say he wasn't all that concerned about losing his wife. It was the possibility of being separated from 11-month-old Freddie Jr. that had him down.

A death wish, career pressures, drugs, women it was all those things, according to the people who knew Freddie best, knew his life and can offer some ideas on what made him end it. Start in Washington Heights on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It's a textbook transitional neighborhood; 25 years ago. Anglo and Jewish with a lot of brownstoncs occupied by faculty and family from City College of New York and Columbia University.

Now. it's mostly Latino Puerto liican and Dominican-sonic blacks, a few Anglos. Not quite a real ghetto yet like Spanish Harlem, the South lironx or ricdford-Sluyvcsant, but getting there quickly. Freddie was born in Washington Heights and lived in a sixth-floor apartment at the corner of W. 157th St. and liroadway. His mother Maria is Puerto Rican. while his father Karl Pruetzel is Hungarian Jewish.

He was an outsider, a moody kid, a chubby little guy who was a bit of a mother's boy in a macho neighborhood. He had a few friends Luis Calderon. Freddie Solcr, both 22. and Warren Lee, 38. who manages Hornstein's Stationery on Broadway. They said he hung out at the store a lot. improvising jokes or "snapping" as they put it. He was in his early teens and "always doing something crazy." Solcr said.

Like he and Luis would go up to the Calderon apartment a few flights up from the subway slop at 157th and Broadway ami wait for the trains to come in and their passengers to walk up the steps from the subway. Freddie and Luis would get a bucket of water and soak some tnilpi paper in it. and then, when the subway crowds started hustling by. the two guys would unload the stuff right on their heads.

Freddie loved doing imitations, keeping his friends in .niches with his version of Nelson Rockefeller campaigning in a Latin neighborhood and Richard Nixon doing time in jail. There was a dark side to Freddie's humor, a ghetto touch thai Calderon admits now could hit so close to home that he had trouble finding it funny.

"He was pretty heavy on roaches and rats." Calderon said. "He hated thcm. He would come to my place and the first think he'd say was ls the rat patrol out yet?' Or he'd see a roach and say. 'No. don't kill him. The rest of 'cm will come out for the Funeral." Freddie read books some. He'd buy them at Hornstein's, according to Warren Lee, but mostly movie star stuff. Paperback biographies ;of Doris Day. Marilyn Monroe and Lennic Bruce.

And he played sports some. Stickball in the streets and football. At first, he threw a football not much better than a girl. But Freddie was determined. "He kept working on it and working on it and working on it," Solcr said, "and he got so he was the best passer in the neighborhood."

And Freddie look karate lessons until he got to the point where he wasn't that little chubby kid anymore, so he could walk the side streets off Broadway at night with his portable radio and girl without fear of the radio being ripped off and his face bent right there in front of her. Which is very important, the macho thing being what it is to a kid in Washington Heights, say Calderon and Soler, both Puerto Rican. college-educated and very straight.

"He didn't relate to girls well." Soler said. "He'd walk into a phone booth and make hundreds of calls and get nowhere. He was kind of nervous with girls." And "a mother's boy in a sense." Calderon added. "She got a job across the street working as a seamstress to be close to him."

"She was overprotective." Soler said, and Freddie, until he started really getting his macho together with football, karate and one or two ladies, had "trouble fitting into our scene." Calderon added. Not that it mattered, really. Hy 15, Freddie was already beginning to drift away. In a couple of different, but very important directions.

First, there was Nat. Nat was a friend of Freddie's from Washington Heights. The one guy who came West with Freddie when he made it. Nat is a hard man to find. He was seen recently on a Los Angeles street corner, dressed pimp-flash.-saying he won't talk about Freddie unless he's paid to. Nat was very close to Freddie, other friends say. If Freddie had any bad habits, then Nat would probably have them. loo. Bui Nat's not talking unless it's for money in which he seems to need rather badly now that Freddie's dead.

At the time Freddie's old friends from the neighborhood began to see less of him. and Nat became more important in Freddie's life, the kid was clean, his friends swear. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke. Thai changed quickly when Freddie started running with Nut.

"I was heavy into cocaine," Prinze said of that period, according lii a recently published report. "Then I started getting really crazy, man. I was dealing grass and I really made bread."

The other way Freddie went, losing touch with the guys who hung out at Hornslein's, was downtown on the subway. He attended the High School of Performing Arts on W. Kith St.. an old. grimy New York City public school across the street from a male bath house in midlown Manhattan.

It's a highly selective little school of COO students with a course of study divided equally between academic subjects and performing arts. Since Performing Arts is vocationally oriented, only talent counts in the application process.

And Freddie was just the latest in a long list of really talented young people to attend Performing Arts. Jerry Kskow. head of the drama department, rattled off a few: "Melissa Manchester. Ben Vereen, Liza Minclli. Dick Bcmamin. Suzanne Pleshelte. Jessica Walter. Dom Del.uise. Herb fiardner who wrote "A Thousand Clowns." Kdwurd Villella. half of Alvin Ailey's people and all his star dancers . . ."

So Freddie was just another promising kid. And to be perfectly honest, like a lot of the others he was not the world's greatest high school student. Eskow said. The thing was. the academic -type classes Knglish and history and math and the usual stuff were in the morning, and drama and dance in the afternoon. "He was very typical of the young artists." said Eskow diplomatically. '"lie found it difficult to get to his other classes. He'd walk in at 1:30 and the academic teachers would be very uptight."

But Freddie was quite serious about the performing end of Performing Arts, so serious in fact, that he never bothered to graduate, dropping out to play a couple of Manhattan nightclubs for free and for the exporienrc.

One of the places was the Improvisation on W. l-lth St. A small, dark club in a rundown neighborhood, it had become the kind of room where bright, young talent go to be discovered. People like Belte Midler and Dick Cavetl have gone there to sharpen their acts and be seen by agents. Freddie went onstage at the Improvisation for the same reason and he was good, instantly good. "He was one of the few that I've ever seen at our auditions that really impressed me." said the club's owner, Budd Friedman. "He had natural talent and was likeable. without material, he was winning the room."

And his description of a "Puerto Rican automobile: "Do '64 Chcbby wid de pompons on dc antennas, saints on dc dashboard, and a little dog in dc back window wid dc head going up and down." At 16, Freddie was on stage for the first time at the Improvisation. At 19, he was settled in Hollywood and a star.

First, there were guest spots on Jack Paar's show. Then Johnny Carson. Then Chico and the Man. It was all fast, very fast. Of course, there were some trips back home in a chauffeured limo; a big, black one rented whenever he was in New York. The old friends from Washington Heights enjoyed his visits to 157th and Broadway. "Sure. I felt comfortable with him when he came back," Warren Lee said. "The only difference I noticed was that he seemed more mature."

The welcome home he got must have been satisfying. "All the senoras, the older women, were hanging on him, kissing his hand." Lee said. And behind them, there were the senoritas, all the younger ones who had picked up the phone five years before and said no to a nervous, chubby, nol-quite-togcther Freddie. But the visits were brief.

Freddie's life now was in Los Angeles where he played the fun-loving, easy-going Chico, and in Las Vegas where he appeared frequently at Caesars Palace. Freddie didn't fit in in Los Angeles or Las Vegas, no better than he did in those early teen years in Washington Heights, according to David Brenner who, with .Jimmie Walker and Richard Pryor, formed a trio of streetwise, younger, comedians to whom the kid from Washington Heights was immediately attracted.

Brenner first met Prinze when Freddie was 17 and confirmed that even then Freddie was "dropping pills. I never saw him use heroin but I know he used coke quite a bit." Brenner helped Freddie get appearances on the Tonight Show, flew him from New York to Las Vegas and took him around to the bigger rooms on the Strip. "T brought him out here as a friend and made him stand on the stages and I told him this town was going to be his some day."

The problem was Freddie had his doubts. "'Freddie didn't love himself and I don't know that he even liked himself very much." Brenner said. "A lot of people felt better about Freddie than he did himself. He used to ask me. 'Do I deserve it (stardom and applause. ) He thought he didn't deserve to stand on a stage and make people laugh. "

Brenner, a frequent recipient of 4 a.m. phone calls from a distraught Freddie crying … "I can't lake it," is no more capable than anyone else of supplying simple answers to the complex question of why Freddie pulled the trigger. "Freddie Prinze lost nothing that would make him kill himself," he said. "Not his career, not his take-home pay. not a woman he loved, not his child. "What he did lose was his world, the street world. When you grow up in a neighborhood like Freddie's, you know every line and where it is drawn what you can say and what you can't say, where you can be after dark and where you can't: you know everything." Freddie was too young.

Brenner said. Los Angeles and stardom were a "jolt" he couldn't handle, according to the New York-based comedian. "I always asked him, 'when arc you gonna gel out of there and come home. There's no reality there.' He was living a false life. The world isn't made up of palm trees, Mercedes Benzes and expensive stores."

Brenner and others who know comedians well point out that they are a special lot whose day-to-day depressions are oftentimes deep and profound. . "Most of us arc neurotic," Brenner said. "We start out as kids, kids telling jokes to keep from crying. It's our way of surviving: it's our escape." Freddie ran out of ways to escape in Los Angeles.

The Bruce fixation was as strong as ever, friends say. He listened to tapes of Lcnnie and thought, really believed that he was Bruce reincarnated. He drove recklessly and finally was busted late last year for driving under the influence of a prescription tranquilizer. "1 wasn't weaving: 1 wasn't even sewing," Freddie told the cop who slopped him.

His drug use. if anything, became heavier. Freddie used up to S2.000 worth of coke a week and a half-dozen Quaaludes a day. He bought the coke and the Quaaludes on the street, or got the latter through a "Dr. Feelgood" type of physician who serves the stars when they come to Las Vegas. The bill for his mistaken marriage came due a couple of days before the end: A court -ordered S5.000 per month for alimony and child support. Guns, toward the end, fascinated him. First a .357 magnum revolver. Then the .32-calibcr automatic. He played with them and often threatened suicide. And, finally, he did it. After a long night of phone calls to his secretary, business manager, personal manager, psychiatrist, mother and estranged wife from the S700-a-month West Los Angeles apartment, the SI million-a-vear kid pulled the trigger. Why? "Freddie never had a chance to say, 'I'm depressed: he just took a pill,' " Budd Friedman said.

"He was depressed about everything . . . and he was so different from Chico and in his personal appearances people were expecting to see Chico." Jimmie Walker said. "Sixty million people made Freddie Prinze a household name without thinking about who he really was or thinking him important, and then he blew his brains out and they want to know what part they played in it." Jerry Eskow said.

"It isn't that we lost a comedian, a man who made people laugh." David Brenner said. "He was a beautiful human being. That's what's so goddamn wasteful. "If Freddie had been with a guy who talked constantly about killing himself before he was 30. Freddie would have busted his ass to keep the guy from doing it. "But Freddie didn't fit in! He destroyed the thing that bothered him most his mind."